Monday 20 February 2012

Advent of the Fried Egg

The Advent Loudspeaker...

...so begins the brochure I have for the, well, Advent Loudspeaker. It also  features The Smaller Advent Loudspeaker. The ones I have are commonly known as Large Advents, and I have both the Original Large Advents (commonly known in short form as OLA) and the New Large Advents (NLA), plus I have a set of the Mini Advents. Enough Advent for you? They made more.

There were Baby Advents and a number of other variants, both before Henry Kloss left the company in 1977 and after when they were owned by Jensen. The Advent company made very few models of speaker at any given time and at least they kept the naming conventione simple. Read more about them here:

http://adventspeakers.net/

My NLA's I bought about a year ago and paid about $150. This was a bit high but they had been kept in very good shape and they recently had their woofers re-foamed. They also were the walnut veneered cabinets with nice bull nose moulding rather then the utility grade vinyl covered ones. These act as my main speakers at home now, and I really like them. Equipped with a 10" woofer they have a nice low low end and a good range overall. I wouldn't call them the highest of high fidelity but they work well for me.

I like them so much that when I saw a pair of OLA's advertised locally for $25 I jumped! I was in the car and heading to North Vancouver within minutes, and soon had them back home. These were also in nice walnut cabinets with moulding of a different design, more of an "innie" than an "outie". They came with the brochure or manual.

Original Large Advent Walnut Veneer

Before I even took them home I saw there was a bit of an issue, though could not tell how significant it was at that moment. The tweeters were mismatched. I had one Fried Egg tweeter and something else. The Fried Egg was an unusual design resembling a sunny side up egg and again was a Kloss innovation. Typically they had the wire cage you see here protecting the yolk...I mean cone.

Original Advent Fried Egg Tweeter

These had also been re-foamed and from what I can tell, they did a good job, but incorrectly. The roll of the foam is the right way as in concave side out, but the outer flange of the foam is supposed to be behind the masonite. I can't say that I could tell the difference if I was able to listen to them side by side with a correct pair so I'm not going to try.

Advent woofer

So this is what the wrong speaker looks like. It is also not painted black on the face, but that is not seen anyway. The tweeter in this one seems to be the same as some later editions of the Advents or at least is considered the replacement for them so is not a bad substitute. See it here at SimplySpeakers.

DSC_0105

Tweeter 85C00019

 Knowing some of the people I know, I figured an original Fried Egg should not be hard to find. In fact I didn't even need to ask. I posted a thread about it at Audiokarma and someone sent me a message soon offering any one of 3 he had and he would send the one that had the closest ohm measurement. I paid as much for it as I did for the speakers, but had it sent to me a couple of months ago, and I finally got to install it this weekend.

It took so long as I had since taken the OLA's to the cabin and had not been there too often recently. I also thought I might have to cut out a bit of the cabinet for the large square magnet of the Egg tweeter. Not so however, and it became obvious that the tweeter shown above was a substitute and the speaker originally had matched the other side. That seems like it would make sense but it was possible that the 2 speakers were not together originally. One had a serial #, the other not, and with one face painted black they again did not looked matched.

Anyway the Fried Egg dropped right in and works great. Even the holes for the screws were perfect (but slightly different from the one I took out), so I think the speaker was happy going back to original. Again I'm not sure I can hear a difference though. No pics of it installed though as I did not have the camera with me at the cabin.

And now I have a decent spare tweeter for the 4 nearly identical speakers I have.

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